Hitler's Willing Executioners

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Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) is a history book by Daniel Goldhagen which posits that ordinary Germans not only knew about, but also supported, the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist" antisemitism in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen writes that this special mentality grew out of medieval attitudes from a religious basis but was eventually secularized.

Goldhagen's book, which began as his Harvard doctoral dissertation, was written largely to rebut the claims of Christopher Browning as to perpetrator motives. The dissertation won the American Political Science Association's 1994 Gabriel A. Almond Award in comparative politics.

He was awarded the prestigious Democracy Prize by the German Journal for German and International Politics; the Journal said that the debate surrounding Goldhagen's book helped sharpen public understanding about the past during a period of radical change in Germany. In the context of German reunification, the Journal said, the book helped underscore that "there is no historical German 'normalcy' to which Germany can return".[1]


Contents

[edit] Goldhagen's argument

Goldhagen argued that Germans possessed a unique form of antisemitism which he called "eliminationist antisemitism". This eliminationist antisemitism developed over centuries prior to the 20th century.

Goldhagen has described his central contentions this way: "The German perpetrators of the Holocaust treated Jews in all the brutal and lethal ways that they did because, by and large, they believed that what they were doing was right and necessary. Second, that there was long existing, virulent antisemitism in German society that led to the desire on the part of the vast majority of Germans to eliminate Jews somehow from German society. Third, that any explanation of the Holocaust must address and specify the causal relationship between antisemitism in Germany and the persecution and extermination of the Jews which so many ordinary Germans contributed to and supported."[2]

[edit] Critical reception of work

Debate about his theory has been intense, with many historians of the subject rejecting Goldhagen's scholarship. The most common general complaints are that his primary hypothesis is simplistic and either unprovable or ill-formed; that he must rely on substantial factual errors and misrepresentations of primary and secondary sources to demonstrate it; and that his methodology requires unjustifiably selective analysis.

In subsequent debates, Goldhagen characterised functionalist claims associated with the period of 1938-1942 as "ahistorical". Even among scholars who wholly reject functionalist arguments, Goldhagen finds virtually no support in excluding examination of this period to understand why antisemitism, "eliminationist" or otherwise, became actively genocidal as and when it did.

  • Bauer has further observed that Goldhagen lacked familiarity with sources not in English or German, which thereby excluded research from Polish and Israeli sources writing in Hebrew, among others, all of whom had produced important research in the subject that would require a more subtle analysis. Bauer also argued that these linguistic limitations substantially impaired Goldhagen from undertaking broader comparative research into European antisemitism, which would have demanded further refinements to his analysis. Lack of comparative analysis is a methodological fault more generally identified by critics who draw particular attention to neglect of France, Hungary, and Romania, which were also violently antisemitic, albeit in different ways, from the period emphasised by Goldhagen's book as determinative to the Holocaust.
  • There are also critics who claim that Goldhagen is not internally consistent in advancing his "eliminationist" hypothesis. Goldhagen repeatedly claims that the average German was full of murderous antisemitism endemic to German culture. If this were true, it would imply that there were no further fundamental distinctions to be made among Germans as far as their susceptibility to participate in the worst crimes of the Holocaust, which begs questions of individual morality and therefore answerability. The men who became the killers profiled in Goldhagen's book only killed because it was part of their German identity. Had they grown up in some other culture, they presumably would not have become killers. Such a notion of motive would therefore be available as an excuse. As some critics would have it, Goldhagen recognized this and therefore repeatedly moralizes about evil choices ―if choices were available, any hypothesis of cultural determination would be sharply mitigated to the point of losing the explanatory power with which Goldhagen invests it. Critics taking this approach contend that Goldhagen is therefore ambivalent about his own conclusions.
  • Both Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer have questioned whether, given that the Department of Political Science at Harvard lacked faculty familiar with research materials for the dissertation topic, it was appropriate for it to accept Goldhagen's dissertation proposal. They further remarked that Goldhagen's level of research ought not have been accepted by any dissertation advisor possessed of such competence.
  • Hilberg has written that Goldhagen is "totally wrong about everything. Totally wrong. Exceptionally wrong."[3]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Harvard Gazette
  2. ^ Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "The Fictions of Ruth Bettina Birn".
  3. ^ "Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A Conversation with Raul Hilberg" (Winter/Spring 2007). Logos: a journal of modern society & culture 6 (1-2). 

[edit] References

  • Bauer, Yehuda Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven [Conn.] ; London : Yale University Press, 2001 ISBN 0-300-08256-8.
  • Eley, Geoff (editor) The Goldhagen Effect : History, Memory, Nazism--Facing The German past, Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2000 ISBN 0-472-06752-4.
  • Feldkamp, Michael F. Goldhagens unwillige Kirche. Alte und neue Fälschungen über Kirche und Papst während der NS-Herrschaft, München : Olzog-Verlag, 2003 ISBN 3789281271
  • Finkelstein, Norman & Birn, Ruth Bettina A Nation On Trial : The Goldhagen Thesis And Historical Truth, New York : Henry Holt, 1998 ISBN 0-8050-5871-0.
  • Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial, New York : Norton, 2001 ISBN 0-393-02044-4.
  • Kershaw, Sir Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives Of Interpretation, London : Arnold ; New York : Copublished in the USA by Oxford University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-340-76028-1
  • Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler : the search for the origins of his evil New York : Random House, 1998 ISBN 0-679-43151-9.
  • Shandley, Robert & Riemer, Jeremiah (editors) Unwilling Germans? : The Goldhagen Debate, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1998 ISBN 0-8166-3101-8.
  • Stern, Fritz "The Goldhagen Controversy: The Past Distorted" pages 272-288 from Einstein's German World, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-691-05939-X.
  • Wesley, Frank The Holocaust And Anti-semitism : the Goldhagen Argument And Its Effects, San Francisco ; London : International Scholars Publications, 1999, 1998 ISBN 1-57309-235-5.
  • Kwiet, Konrad: “‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ and ‘Ordinary Germans’. Some Comments on Goldhagen’s Ideas,” Jewish Studies Yearbook 1 (2000) (online at http://www.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/pdf/01_kwiet.pdf)
  • LaCapra, Dominick: “Perpetrators and Victims: The Goldhagen Debate and Beyond,” in LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (= ch. 4) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), 114-140.
  • Pohl, Dieter: "Die Holocaust-Forschung und Goldhagens Thesen," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 45 (1997).

[edit] External links

Critical analyses

Persondata
NAME Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION political scientist and Holocaust historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH